ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses a twentieth-century-specific response to female vocality via a chain of remediations of Jean Cocteau's play La Voix Humaine, ending with a case study of the overlooked but exemplary vocal performance by Ingrid Bergman in The Human Voice. Despite Cocteau's minimisation of it, the telephone in La Voix Humaine endured as one of the most persistent symbols and psychologised icons of his works. Subsequent remediations take La Voix Humaine in the direction of the intensified psychologisation of voice simultaneous to its remediation in the cinema. Ingrid Bergman’s (even somewhat faded) box-office appeal would have been a consideration for the BBC’s commercial competitor ITV which screened The Human Voice. The visual codes of abandonment in the Human Voice begin with the torn and defaced images of the absent, inaudible male lover which also doubles as his corporealisation.
